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Maria Giudice

Board member since 2014

Maria Giudice describes herself as an “innovator, artist, protagonist, and positive provocateur.” She is Facebook’s director of product design, and she has been a CCA faculty member since 2006 in the MBA in Design Strategy and the Graduate Program in Design.

She founded the experience design firm Hot Studio in 1997; the firm eventually grew to include 100 employees with offices in San Francisco and New York and an impressive list of Fortune 500 clients. In March 2013, it was acquired by Facebook.

Before Hot Studio, Guidice spent time working under the iconic graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman, who coined the term “information architecture.”

Giudice says, “I am incredibly excited and honored to be asked to join CCA’s board. I’m bringing to the board a lot of business experience, but also a deep understanding of what it’s like to be a student and a faculty member.

“I’m particularly keen on thinking about future learning, what students need to know going forward. I want to get involved in the curriculum, specifically designing ways in which the different groups at CCA can work together and create more overlaps between disciplines -- more intersections among verticals.

"Art and design are blending into so many other arenas, and ‘verticalization’ is no longer an efficient approach to learning.”

Giudice also plans to take an active part in designing the future of CCA as an academic institution.

“As a business owner, I’m very aware of the need for CCA to scale and be agile for the future. Most schools still organize themselves according to an industrial age mindset and haven’t evolved nimbly enough to deal with all the different ways in which students learn today.”

Guidice earned her bachelor’s degree from the Cooper Union, where she took courses in painting, calligraphy, and graphic design.

She is the coauthor and designer of several books about design, including the recent Rise of the DEO, which discusses the ascendant concept of the “design executive officer” (the book’s other coauthor is Christopher Ireland, also a CCA faculty member.)